“Enception”

Metaphysics, Philosophy

I’ve struggled to develop concepts and language around the idea of “enceptions”, a capacity to take-as-given some form of experience, whether concept or percept. These forms are received as gestalt wholes, and poking around etymonline.com I’ve succumbed to the temptation to steal some Heideggerian jargon and use it in a clashingly confusing way: gestell. A gestell or enception — I am using them synonymously — receives some experience as a gestalt.

An enception is not — and necessarily cannot be — an intentional object of experience, but is rather a condition for any objective given. To steal and misuse yet more jargon from eminent Germans, an enception (or gestell) is a transcendental “category”. My Kantianism is akin to Cassirer’s.

So givenness of a form is dependent on a capacity to take it. This much is simple. But how does one account for enceptions, especially with respect to acquisition of new capacities?

One central fact must be considered: enceptions rarely, if ever, occur in isolation. They tend to change entire fields of experience, as if crystallizing a supersaturated solution of perplexity. A re-understanding of one particular truth seems to ripple instantaneously across one’s understanding of everything, on the whole and in every part.

I’m re-rereading my all-time favorite book, by Richard J. Bernstein, and in it he quotes Thomas Kuhn saying:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, …when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

But does the change really originate in the particular idea? Does the change of understanding radiate outward from the idea in question?

The question reminds me of our casual notions of lightning. We tend to assume movement from some set point of origin in the sky. But the apparent movement of lightning is not an object moving from one place to another — bolts mythically hurled from clouds — but, rather, a charged field, the site of a complex resolution of destabilized difference, that dramatically strikes certain objects in the path of change. What seems to be the origin is sometimes the destination, or one of multiple origins destined to meet at one or more cracking midpoints.

Increasingly, enceptions strike me as articulations of an all-inclusive field, and that the field itself somehow determines the natural jointing of the articulations. And our own linguistic articulation tends to follow the forking fracture-lines of this field, producing the famous and disputed correspondence between word and thing.

According to this conception, the field itself — the all-inclusive “everything” — is what changes, and the focal object, the thing that induced the change to the field, is one of myriad simultaneous effects in this restructuring of the field.

The field is all-inclusive everything both actual and possible, beyond which nothing can be conceived, and therefore exteriorless — at least objectively.

This is what Levinas called a totality. And Heidegger’s gestell (as opposed to my own) is clearly (at least as it seems to me) an example of one totality that takes givens in a distinctive way.

Some totalities confuse their apparent all-inclusivity with infinity.

But a totality is a quasi-infinitude. Each totality is only one of a plurality — one within One — a real, realistic image of a reality that infinitely exceeds its comprehension.

Each totality strives to contain all others, and to the degree it succeeds, it fails.

Despite the philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds — “Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes) — I would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality of their laughing — up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And supposing that Gods also philosophize, which I am strongly inclined to believe, owing to many reasons — I have no doubt that they also know how to laugh thereby in an overman-like and new fashion — and at the expense of all serious things! Gods are fond of ridicule: it seems that they cannot refrain from laughter even in holy matters. — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Conception articulates ideal forms from an all-comprehensive, exteriorless whole — a quasi-infinity. The articulations are capacities to take as given a set of possible and actual forms within a given reality.

This is why our fundamental conceptions matter so much to us — our metaphysics, our key symbols, our founding stories, our given truths — literally everything and every given thing is at stake.

Construction combines givens into systems of various complexity and scale.

Construction builds up larger units from smaller ones, but every unit is given by conception, each articulated from the largest conceivable universal unit.

But some construction can destabilize the conceptive order.

And some construction can force a partial or total reconception.

Like forking lightning the totality shatters the whole into new articulations and new shards, new givens.

“Transcendental tinkering”

Design, Esoterism, Philosophy

“Transcendental tinkering” is a nice slangy expression of what theosophy actually does.

What theosophy claims to do is much better handled by design. I will say it again: Design fulfills alchemy’s hopes.

This fulfillment only happens, however, when design does its deep work of transcendental tinkering.

When it limits itself to aesthetic and functional tinkering, design betrays its promise.

Third runner-up: “psyche hacking”.

Designerly praxis, hexis, psyche, nous

Design, Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Faith is a subjective integral stability that takes reality as given in some particular way.

I have understood praxis as the reciprocity between practice-informed theory and theory-guided practice. I think this is right as far as it goes. But praxis always has a knowing-doing subject, and that subject is developed through praxis.

Is it habit? Certainly habit is necessary. Social constructivists would love it to be sufficient.

It is not, however, sufficient. Not every construction, however habituated to it we might become, is spontaneously recognized as a gestalt. Some complex forms stabilize as simple gestalts, where others remain familiar complexities that we are able to construe with increasing speed and ease. Contrary to constructivist prejudice, gestalt recognition isn’t double-plus fast construal and construction. It is a spontaneously recognized form latent in a person’s given sense of everything, much as stable crystal formations are latent in a supersaturated solution. Perceptive and conceptive wholes — gestalts — articulate within a metaphysic supersaturated with formal potentiality. With apologies to Heidegger, I call any capacity for gestalt gestell. (Technik is only one degraded possibility of gestell, just as the They is only one degraded possibility of public being.)

Beneath habit — and often in existential tension with it — is faith.

(When faith stabilizes on an atomistic, reductionistic understanding of reality and forms habits of distrusting gestalts and accepting only systematic accounts, the tension between habit and faith snaps, and social constructionism becomes self-evidently true. Your skepticism is selective, o ye of excessive habit.)

At the heart of praxis is faith-in-motion that integrates and stabilizes in the midst of the practice-theory cycle. Faith is both the cause and the effect of praxis.

This morning I wrote an email to a professor, to get advice on possible programs of study. In this email, I described what I have been doing in the wee hours of the morning for the last quarter century:

Background: I have been working as a human-centered designer (HCD) for the last three decades, while spending my mornings trying to find adequate conceptual framing and language for HCD. Design work is material and systematic, but it is also intersubjective and conceptual; ultimately, it involves as much transcendental tinkering as it does material craft. Designers tend to strategically suppress these esoteric undersides of our craft. I think the field would benefit from clear articulation of the realities of our work.

My studies have led me into some iffy corners of the philosophical world. I wouldn’t call these regions irrational, but they might not be acknowledged as philosophical in some philosophy departments.

My reason for pursuing a degree is that I have been working in isolation for decades, without any critical accountability or community, and I think my work has suffered for it. But the wrong kind of criticism can be worse than none.

I have developed a design praxis. I want to convey this praxis to other designers so we are equipped to explain and justify ourselves to others. Some of that equipment will be arms and armor.

Seven theses on conceptive-systemic wholeness

Design, Philosophy

Metaphors carry meaning over — meta- “across” + -phor “to carry, or bear.” Etymonline quotes Aristotle:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. [Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1459a 3-8]

My question is: meaning of what specific kind?

This question of kinds of meaning goes directly to the heart of design, because the best designers, like artists, intuit more types and nuances and depths of meaning, and try to convey (carry, bear) these meanings between people and collectivities.

Some meaning is objective. It is cognitive and recognitive know-what. You can define an object over against what it is not, then analyze its construction to see what elements make it up, what relationships obtain among the elements and what ways the elements interact to make the object what it is. And objects need not be material. They may be conceptual, too. What makes an object an object is its definite form — what the entity is in opposition to what it is not. Objective knowledge is know-what.

Recognition of what a thing is requires intuition — a tacit know-what — occurring an instant before objectivity, making objective understanding possible. Designers are keenly concerned with this intuitive recognition. When it fails, and people are unable to grasp what a thing is, it causes anxiety, antipathy and disengagement.

This is one reason designers rely on metaphor to make complex new things seem like familiar old things. But, perhaps beyond popular consideration, metaphors carry even more consequential meanings than objective recognition, namely practical know-how and felt know-why.

And this is where knowledge ends for a great many people. Knowledge is objective comprehension. Everything else is subjective opinion or imagination or emotions, all insufficiently rational to deserve the status of knowledge.

Designers, however, know that some meaning is purely practical. We do not stop and define terms and assign language to what we encounter. Rather, we simply act in response. Are these responses natural instinct? Are they acquired habits? Designers don’t have to care. Whether something is natural or second-natural, the goal is naturalness — to remove the burden and distancing of verbalization, and allow people to intuitively interact with things, so they become transparent extensions of our own being. Polanyi called this kind of intuition tacit knowledge — and here it could be called tacit know-how.

Confusingly, words themselves are things that can become transparent extensions of being. Spontaneous fluency makes words extensions of the speaker or writer, bearing one’s being to listeners or readers. But when words must be used to understand other words — when translation or construal of meaning becomes necessary — the words lose transparency. Each use of words to understand words creates intuitive distance. Perhaps a metaphor can make what I mean here more immediate: Imagine using a robot arm to operate another robot arm to operate yet another robot arm. Such is the use of words to understand other words (or using concepts to understand other concepts) versus having an immediate intuitive grasp of the matter at hand. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the language of experience-near versus experience-distant to express this, which, ironically, does a wonderful job of making this concept itself experience-near. Experience-nearness is a quality of usable systems.

Further, and crucially, some designers also know that some of the most important meanings are felt value. It moves us emotionally. This is the sense of meaning intended when we say something is deeply meaningful to us. Let us follow Polanyi’s pattern by calling this kind of intuition tacit know-why.

Some theses.

Thesis 1: Conceptive givenness precedes and conditions objectivity. It is by conception that all units of construction are perceived and conceived.

Thesis 2: Conceptive givens are articulate articulations of a comprehensive sense of everything that differs among people, and that can even change over time for one person. The comprehensive sense of everything is what is expressed by metaphysics, but exists prior to metaphysical expression, and all belief, as faith. Faith predisposes a soul to intuit in some particular way.

Thesis 3: Metaphor is one vehicle for conceptive givenness. Other vehicles are story and symbol, including presentational and performative symbols.

Thesis 4: It is by conceptive givenness (conveyed by its various vehicles) that know-how and know-why are intuitively conveyed.

Thesis 4.1: Metaphor, and concept in general, is not only a cognitive aid to help users identify what a designed artifact is. It is the primary vehicle of practical and emotional engagement.

Thesis 5: Concept and system should be intentionally kept in congruent relation. Neither determines the other. They must each maintain their own respective wholeness (for concept, articulate gestalt and for system, logical-causal integrity), as well as their conceptive-systemic wholeness.

Thesis 6: The conceptive-systemic wholes requires correspondence of articulate gestalts with systematized units across scales, from the smallest to the largest.

Thesis 7: Concept cannot be deferred until after the construction of a system. For conceptive-systemic wholeness, concept and system must be developed together, each in response to the other.

All too often, objectivists (here meant as people whose understanding is limited to objective cognition) tend to believe systems do more than they can.

The systems theory concept of emergent properties is stretched to imply that all kinds of mysterious and unpredictable things might emerge — what, how and why meanings — even if the parts don’t seem to promise them in sum. The possibility gets carried over into expectation. Whether objectivist systematizers think it explicitly or assume it implicitly, they behave as if systematic construction alone is sufficient to get things to where they need to be. Whatever desired properties don’t emerge on their own can be added after the system is constructed. But first, there must be something to which these desired properties may be added. The metaphor is something like: You can’t ice a cake that hasn’t been baked.

The upshot is that systematic construction is the first order of business, and that conceptual meaning (conveyed by metaphor, story, model or other means) can come later. In my experience this is the wishful thinking of people who are impatient or anxious to show immediate progress to impatient bosses. They will claim to aspire to genuinely inspiring, intuitive products — because to say otherwise would feel weird — but in practice they are perfectly satisfied with something functionally adequate that can be figured out with a reasonable amount of effort. Barely good enough is good enough.

Design at its best aspires to more. Design pursues conceptive-systemic wholeness.

Design is humankind’s best hope for overcoming nihilism. It conceives and constructs worlds we naturally care about. And the design process itself induces exnihilism.

Design is essentially polycentered

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I keep returning to my recent thinking on design, especially the latest one on rendering experiential intent.

In that latest post, which focuses on a landmark 2014 article by Jared Spool, where he introduces the definition, my complaint is about emphasis.

While “rendering of intent” is a necessary condition of anything called design, it is not sufficient to illuminate what makes human-centered design (HCD) so incomprehensible to people who haven’t participated in HCD.

And I argue (maybe a little shakily) that when a designer is asked “ok, so what is it that you do, again?” that this is not a request for the common characteristic of every activity describable as design, but, rather, something closer to, “If your job is to make things, then why are you always flying around the world to visit people in their homes and workplaces and get them to teach you about their lives?”

Qualifying the intent to be rendered as including experiential intentions helps for sure, but this qualification not only buries the lede — it buries the lede alive. It creates the impression that what human-centered designers do is just like what everyone else does — because everyone renders intent, everyone designs, everyone is, in fact, a designer — it’s just that what human-centered designers design carries an additional set of experiential intentions.

My argument is that the difference between general rendering of intent and rendering experiential intent across subjective difference is decisively, ontologically different, and it is this ontological difference that matters most.

It is the difference missed by builders of systems, and, in fact, is what these builders often reject as nothing, or at least something of negligible importance.

This difference is what ought to be emphasized in any definition of design as human-centered designers practice it.

And further, the difference is so profound that human-centered design oughtn’t be treated as a qualifier of “design”, but rather design is the qualifier of what, in a design context, has been called human-centered.

More and more, though, what design seems to me to be is not human-centered but polycentered.

We are humans. We are each born into the center of reality as given to each of us. We are essentially, inescapably human-centered, and never more than when we understand truth in that most human of ways: objectively.

What is much, much harder for us is to recognize that we are not the only center of the universe. And that our objective understanding of objective reality is not the only given objectivity. Objective truth does not exhaust truth and truth does not exhaust reality.

Design is one of many possible responses to the polycentered insight.

What design has lost is polycenteredness.

Design has degraded to monocentered rendering of managerial intent.

Spool’s definition masks this degradation.

Polycentered design renders a plurality of interlapping intents.

No design artifact is a tree.

Zeno’s Golden Rule

Ethics, Fructivism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Years ago, I got embroiled in a debate regarding the value of the Golden Rule.

My philosophical sparring partner said the rule invited superficial abuse. We run the risk of doing to or for others what we would want, instead of what they would want.

My argument is that application of the Golden Rule itself is also subject to the Golden Rule. Would you have another apply the Golden Rule superficially to impose their preferences upon you? No? Then how would you have the Golden Rule applied? Do that.

Now let’s say that even this meta-application of the Golden Rule results in something unwanted by the recipient of our well-intentioned act. Now what? Apply the Golden Rule again. Perhaps we would have them learn what we want (or even if we want something done) before doing something to or for us? Maybe we would have them ask us about it, or even ask for our explicit permission.

But even here, preferences vary. For example, if I were to ask my wife permission before kissing her, she would have refused every time, each time with intensified disgust. But she did want me to be attuned to her and not just barge in whenever I got an impulse. The Golden Rule required me to learn to read the waters over an alien and mysterious psyche, and, further — crucially — that I maintain respect precisely for this mysteriousness. Trying to explicate the mystery meant instant ick. Ok! I got to work learning how to intuitively navigate this incomprehensible terrain, because I have my own weird ways, too, and I wish to have them respected as a condition of deepened intimacy.

How many recursions of the Golden Rule was involved in this last example?

As many recursions as intervals of space traversed by Achilles in Zeno’s thought experiment.

Achille infinite traversals are an artifact of the framing of Zeno’s problem, not individual acts of traversal. Only by confusing cognition with being does motion seem impossible, despite motion.

Ultimately, the Golden Rule, understood radically, points to a reality that cognition renders impossible.

We intuit that transcendent being — being who transcends intelligibility.

Some of this transcendent reality lives in the people around us.

And some of what we have decided to honor as Transcendence is the most immanent thing of all, the graven images of our own intelligible imagination!

Mystical experiences, inspiring ideas, answered prayers — they are all so easy compared to the infuriating arbitrariness of a spouse, friend, neighbor or enemy.

“What resists is real.” — Bruno Latour

Crystallizing ring

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Religion

Faiths are profoundly weird things.

To start with, faiths are not things at all, nor are they made out of things. Faiths are not constructions, and they cannot be constructed.

The logic of a faith — and faiths always do have a logic — is a logic that emerges from it. The faith precedes and produces the logic.

This is true even when they express themselves as arguments, as they do in ideological expressions.

Hearing the testimony of a convert persuaded by an ideological or doctrinal argument, it rarely seems as though the logic of the argument was what compelled belief. The logic serves more as an adhesive for constructing an idea that, once assembled, can be recognized — conceived as a whole — a crystallizing ring that reorders all, centrifugally and centripetally. Or it is the processional order (seder, liturgy) of a participation that keeps moving after the ritual concludes. The logic does not prove, it animates one’s thinking, speaking, acting and feeling. One is moved by faith.

It seems that this animating conception, once conceived and in motion, takes the believer in. This taking-in reconstitutes the believing, the believed-in world and the believer.

The reality remains as it always was, but inhabited differently. And this inhabiting is not even primarily theoretical. It is practical. It is material. Such conceptions transform and re-enworld a person and that person’s relationship with the givenness of literally everything and every possible thing everything comprises.

Once moved by faith, belief itself moves by faith, is animated in faith.

An incomprehensible truth: The particular beliefs themselves are not the material of the faith or its enworldment, though they seem to be, but rather a product of the faith and an artifact of the enworldment. They are the fruit by which the faith is known, but they must never be confused with the faith itself, which cannot be grasped by the fruit. One does not possess a tree, much less an orchard, by eating apples.

To treat a faith as a belief-system, or to speak of faith as if it is a degree of strength of conviction that a belief-system is true — these indicate profound religious confusion. Religion is only expressed as doxa, it is not constructed from doxa. Anyone who tries to build a religion out of doxa is more likely to be buried alive in word rubble than to penetrate the roof of heaven.

In nature, conception initiates gestation. Cells grow and divide, differentiate and multiply, within a viable environment. In spirit, conception initiates an articulate gestalt within an intelligible All. Givens divide and grow, differentiate and multiply… eventually into constructible quantities. In both cases we are like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous joke. “How’s the amniotic fluid, embryos?”

How’s the faith, spirits?

What the hell is faith?

Be careful what you inhabit, for you will become of it.

All this is a reflection on a wayward mystic friend, addicted to online edgelord content, somehow in lockstep agreement with edgelord doxa. Anyone who comes to second-naturally despise India, Indians, Jews and Israel — two peoples of mystical genius — will cacophonize against my own faith. It’s all doxa, for sure, but its opinion on what is ortho is wrong — diabolically wrong. In ancient Hebrew it is the heart — lev — who thinks. Do not presume that abstract mourning is less felt.

Under the managerial gaze

ANT, Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Studying the sociology and history of the physical sciences I have learned to see science and technology as inseparable, differing not in kind but in intention and emphasis. Technoscience is not the combination of science and technology but an essentially mingled field of activity that produces both abstract knowledge and concrete artifacts. Both the abstract knowledge and the concrete artifacts may be reinvested in yet more technoscientific activity to produce more of the same. The activity of inventing new concrete artifacts may generate new abstract knowledge. Among invented artifacts are instruments used to generate new abstract knowledge. New abstract knowledge might enable the invention of new artifacts. Generally, scientific knowledge is validated by technoscience itself through applications, both in the general public and in scientific facilities like laboratories and observatories.

This technoscientific validation, as I understand it in my own simplistic lay-scholarly way, is the essential difference between premodern and modern science.

I want to apply this understanding to my own world, the world of design.

I would like to propose a particular subset of technoscience, which, being technoscientific, can be understood on a continuum between abstract knowledge and concrete artifacts — all generated by the essentially mingled field of technoscientific activity.

In this particular subset of technoscience let’s place social science toward the abstract knowledge end of the continuum.

And on the right: design.

And let’s call that blooming, buzzing, semichaotic but rational middle region sociotechnoscience.

Except — surprise! — this is not a subset of technoscience. It is its superset.

Technology is the logos of techne — of making. Science and technology studies has followed in the footsteps of pragmatism, and in some ways has materialized pragmatism, to show how science is, in fact, a social phenomenon, and that social phenomena are largely material.

Years ago, at the peak of “Design Thinking” — when all the most fashionably visionary managerials were running around headquarters holding forth on “designerly” ways of thinking and working — my friend Stokes and I were having lunch on a bakery patio, reflecting on the fervor.

We were both veterans of the dot.bomb era, and had seen design go from chopped liver to divine golden utopian promise and back again to chopped liver. Apparently we were back to divine golden utopian promise, again.

We were both skeptical, but Stokes’s skepticism was better. It was informed by years of formal science and technology studies and anthropological fieldwork. He casually tossed off a remark that blew my mind and permanently changed the course of my life.

He said that there is, in reality, very little difference between how scientists and designers think and work.

He said that the popular view of scientific rationality and rigor is distorted and mostly mythical. It is a misconception of science that could be called “scientism”.

He said that if scientists were made to conform to the image and norms of scientism, they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs anymore. They would be unable to produce new knowledge or devise new technological artifacts. To the degree that they cooperated, they would be paralyzed and rendered unproductive. If they were to succeed, they would do so despite the imposition of “scientific rigor”.

He said that this is basically what happens when corporate managerials get all scientific and rigorous, as they do periodically, when being the visionary guru goes out of fashion and being a hard-nosed, rigorous realist is what wins admiration and prestige. They tighten up their belts and start imposing scientistic rigor on anything that attracts their attention, and everyone trapped under their managerial gaze gets so uptight and preoccupied with producing quantified evidence and ironclad arguments that it becomes damn near impossible to produce much else.

Then came the good part: The only way to escape this scientistic imposition is to be so unimportant that the managerial gaze never gazes upon you. This is why design was able to develop designerly ways of producing good stuff.

Design, according to Stokes, was too unimportant to attract managerial attention and demands for scientific rigor. Because it evaded aggressive management, design was able to work productively. Reflection on how this productive work was done eventually became a methodology and was packaged and marketed by enterprising nerds as “design thinking”.

By the way, this was only the second-most consequential thing Stokes has told me.

…So now managerials had a shiny new thing to grasp onto, distort, mythologize, misconceive and impose upon whatever strikes them as mission critical.

Rigidity, logic, argument, quantification, deliberation, linearity, safety, left-brain rationality are out. Inspiration! Empathy! Insights! Creativitivity! Nonlinear, lateral, liminal, right-braininess! Double-diamonds! Take risks! Sketch! Post-its and paper plastered on all surfaces. Methodic madness. And so on! Everybody’s gotta do fun, silly icebreakers, and do arts n’ crafts stuff with markers and pipe-cleaners, because brain science and innovation and all that. It’s all so zany.

We could, if we want to, call this “designism”. And I do want to.

Designism is every bit as counterproductive as scientism.

Anyone hoping to be productive is better off working in unmanaged obscurity. The minute the managerials pick up the scent of importance, they’ll be after you seeking accelerated production of whatever golden eggs you lay.

After one or two cycles of this, you learn to brace for the hard-nose hangover to come.

I’ve seen three so far. We are in the third right now, and it is the worst yet.

I am weary of this managerialist faith, this technik faith, this instrumental unreason.

I am weary of listening to its various strains and ideological expressions critiquing one another. Corporate capitalism, technocratic socialism, progressivism, “radical” leftism, theocratic fundamentalism — they are all just different flavors of the same poison. When they get radical, they only become more radically managerialist, and managerialism is the root of our problems.

I am savoring my momentary break from managerial attention. I am not sure I can make myself reenter its sphere and subject myself to its icky, icky gaze.

I have some golden eggs to lay, and I can’t waste any more time fleeing KPI-wielding productivity butchers.

Yes-anding “design is the rendering of intent”

Design, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

Many designers have adopted Jared Spool’s definition of design: Design is the rendering of intent.

Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as “the rendering of intent.” The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

We’ve found this definition seems to resonate with people more than any other. People can see the relationship between the intended outcome and the process that renders it.

There is much to like in this definition. It is crisp, compact and elegant.

The definition is broad but still meaningfully constrained. Design renders but does not execute, produce or otherwise actualize the intent. The rendering specifies a future actualization.

The more I reflect on it, the more I like this definition — at least as the most universal definition of design.

Anyone who says they are designing anything means at least this.

My only question concerns whether this definition of design really answers the question people are asking when they ask professional designers what they do.

For some time now, it has been de rigueur to claim that, because everyone designs, everyone is a designer.

Spool affirms this explicitly:

An implication of this definition for design is how it changes our notion of who is a designer.

In any organization, many people share what they’d like to see as the intentions of the design. The business people have intentions with regards to how the business makes money. The technical people have intentions to best use servers, networks, and other technical resources. The legal team has intentions on how to best protect the organization from legal threats.

As these people use their influence to define the outcome of the design, they are, in effect, designing. There’s an old saying, everyone thinks they are a designer. Well, everyone who participates in the rendering of their intention is a designer, using this definition.

So by Spool’s definition (and also Herbert Simon’s, Nigel Cross’s, etc.) everyone does render intent, or devises a course of action meant to turn an existing situation into a preferred one, etc. Whenever we make a shopping list we are designing an upcoming trip to the store. Whenever we plan our day we are designing it. What could possibly render intent more than a checklist?

For Spool, the main difference between the design that designers do and the design that all people do is what the intentions include. Designers intend experiences:

Experiences are the journeys that people take before, during, and after coming into contact with our design. We can choose our intentions for what we want our users’ journeys to be. And when we render those intentions, we’re designing for our users’ experiences. Experience design is rendering intentions of the user’s journey.

But here is the problem. Does Spool’s general definition of design really get at what people are implicitly wondering when they ask designers what they do?

Does anyone wonder this way about making plans or shopping lists? I suspect not. Even narrowing the definition of design to what engineers mean when they talk about designing (for example, an algorithm, microchip or suspension bridge) seems to miss something essential. Do people really wonder what engineers are doing when they do engineering design? I seriously doubt it.

Not to get meta, but questions of exactly this kind — questions concerning focus of interest, about different qualities of various experiences, including experience of curiosity, of implicit questions animating explicit questions — are all examples of the kind of thing designers must think about when practicing design that focuses on experiential intent.

Spool deemphasizes the essence of design, and elides the heart of the question, in the effort to provide an accessible definition to non-designers.

It is the experiential intent that a designer’s work is all about. It is this experiential intent — not intents in general — that gives the kind of design that designers do its aura of elusive significance. These are what motivate questions about what design is. People aren’t requesting a compact definition of a general field of activity. They are asking for insights into a field of work that feels important in an elusive way they can’t quite pin down.

The definitions offered by Spool, Simon, Cross and the rest neglect this essential difference, and do less than nothing to elucidate it. They answer a question, but not the relevant one. These answers falsely demystify design. Rather than elucidating the mystery, they suppress and flatten it.

To put it in philosophical language, these general definitions of design identify necessary conditions of all activities that are referred to as designing, but are insufficient to define or clarify what designers do.

But this isn’t just a theoretical philosophical problem. It isn’t idle definitional hair-splitting. It is a practical problem with extensive consequences. Experiential intent changes everything.

Designing across subjective difference is an essentially different activity than planning something that can be understood objectively. The inclusion of subjective factors changes why design matters, and how the work must be done and what conditions and resources are required to do it well.

If experience design is taken as just one more variation on rendering intent, differing only in the scope of the intention, it is natural to assume the activity is essentially like making a checklist or producing a schematic of a microchip. It is reasonable to assume that it involves the same kinds of activities, and differs mainly in what expertise gets applied to the intent-rendering problem.

And if you listen to designers about what gets in the way of good design, you will hear exactly this misconception behind it. The process of shaping an experience another person will have introduces challenges other intent-rendering fields do not face. Designers need iterative contact with the people for whom the design is intended, both to inform the intention and to ensure that the experience will actualize as intended. Further, the process of shaping experiences involves developing systems, but not only that. It also must make sense to people, it must matter to them, and it must be intuitive to deal with — and different people respond very differently to things.

The flattening of design into something like the planning activities of managers and the system-construction activities of engineers simplifies the challenges designers face, and pushes them back into designing things instead of experiences.

Everyone might render intent, but not everyone renders experiential intent.

And rendering experiential intent requires a deep shift in understanding that very few people have undergone. It requires a pluralistic capacity — at minimum an ability to intersubjectively switch between alternate objectivities — and ideally, a capacity to conceive entirely new ones.

It is precisely this capacity that gives design its mysterious importance.

It is a mysterious importance that is felt as different from the utilitarian importance of business people rendering their intentions of making money for the business, or technical people rendering their intentions to use servers, networks, and other technical resources effectively.

And, as Spool himself describes, experience designers must coordinate all these intent-rendering activities so they contribute to rendering an experiential intent.

If designers stop doing this, they may still claim to design in the general sense, but they are not designers in the sense that intrigues and provokes questions. They are planners, list makers and system constructors.

And now with service design, experiences are no longer intended for solitary people, like users or customers or patients and so on. Service designers intend experiences that multiple persons with differing (and potentially conflicting) goals, understandings, attitudes and sensibilities will experience together simultaneously. Part of what these people experience is each other in their various roles in the experience. Polycentered design requires capacities of another order beyond that of mono-centered design fields.

Polycentered experiences (that is, experiences with multiple first-person centers) motivate behaviors that collectively produce emergent properties in social systems (polycentric systems with multiple independent agentic centers, a la Polanyi and Ostrom).

The barely good enough experience

Brand, Design

Organizations are investing less in design, not because they have found ways to offer good experiences with less design investment, but because organizations believe they can offer worse experiences and succeed anyway.

These organizations are not aiming for the best experiences. They are aiming for barely good enough ones.

The ideal of the barely good enough experience skirts a fine line between passive and active dissatisfaction.

Active dissatisfaction is where people do something about the bad experiences they are having. They leave or refuse to cooperate, and these actions have a negative business impact.

Passive dissatisfaction is a state where people are unhappy but not so unhappy that they do anything. They grudgingly stick around and do what the organization wants. Consequently, the displeasure has no negative business impact.

Many organizations see passive dissatisfaction as the sweet spot. If customers or employees and partners are too happy, that indicates that the organization left money on the table. Money that can be spent on operational efficiency, or strategic investments of various kinds (AI, new markets, consumer-choice-restricting acquisitions of competitors, etc.), or on growth, or on executive salaries. These, it is believed, will serve the organization better than wastefully excessive happiness of customers or employees.

Think about it: Are your consumer experiences improving?

Are you having better and better experiences receiving services from organizations? Do you feel less frustrated with the organizations in your life? Do you feel better served than, say, ten years ago?

Is your digital life improving? Are the apps you use less confusing and frustrating than the ones you used ten years ago? How do you feel when you see an app update on your phone? Are you excited, or filled with apprehension?

Are your employment experiences improving?

A hopeful coda: A market dominated by passive dissatisfaction is ripe for disruption by companies who choose to compete on experience, and promise active satisfaction to people weary of diluted abuse.

Transcendental pluralism

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Transcendentalism across its varieties claims that experience, including thought, imagination and perception — in other words, inner and outer and everything between — has some necessarily a priori structure by which it is given, which conditions that given world.

I am what could be called a transcendental pluralist.

The psychic order by which experience is given can legitimately vary, sometimes radically, but these various orders are not arbitrary. Only some transcendental orders are possible.

An authentic transcendental structure clicks and crystallizes into an articulate sense of everything, to which experiences are given and conceived together. This is what a subject is, when understood properly, that is, nonobjectively.

The conditions of any possible transcendental order are the metasubject of metaphysics, and its truth is the furthest thing from objective. It is the source of subjectivity, and subjectivity is the condition of objectivity and the phenomenon of objects.

Transcendental orders can be induced to change. Such changes are conversions.

The event of conversion — whether a minor insight on some aspect of one’s life about which one (literally) changes one’s mind, a scientific paradigm, a philosophical turn, or a religious conversion — these are all top-down reorderings of transcendental organization.

Conversions are hard to understand and talk about. They are impossible to understand without reference to an actual experience of conversion.

But those without such experience go ahead and understand them anyway, by whatever understanding of everything they already have. These misunderstandings are the stuff of religious and antireligious fanaticism.

The strongest opinions on religion — for and against, alike — are held by people lacking all religious experience. Some have altered their belief systems, but only the irreligious can confuse belief systems with religion, or strength of conviction that these belief systems are true with faith. There is fervent emotional passion about beliefs — pro and con — but this fervor is not religious, but in fact the diabolical opposite.

Faith is transcendental organization, and faith “in something” is a function of fit between the articulate organs of faith’s essential organization and some conceptual, material or practical system.

What constructivists (and relativists) miss is the question of responsibility.

Any construction that aspires to truth must respond to matter and it must respond to transcendental authenticity. This does not mean that it must obey matter or transcendental authenticity, just that it must respond to them in good faith. It means that our belief systems are only authentically believed to the degree that they articulate what we actually experience both inwardly and outwardly. Mismatches can and always must exist, but good faith requires candid confession of confusion, unclarity, doubt, even local disbelief, and these mismatches are rarely clear or easy to pin down.

We tend to ignore or suppress these mismatches, because they all threaten to destabilize our transcendental order. They seem to be existential threats to truth, to our sense of identity, to literally everything — because they, in fact, are. But there is more to reality than any particular everything. And precisely this moreness is the essence of religion.

These perplexing mismatches between faith and system are where the light of infinitude shows through the cracks of finitude and threatens to submerge it in holy reunification.

Now I will speak religiously to the religious:

Yetzirah responds both to Asiyah — what materials will and won’t do — and to Beriah — the simultaneous plurality of all possible transcendentalisms.

In Yetzirah, we are Ruach, the transcendental formation to whom the world is given as an articulate, exteriorless whole, and by whom its given world and all its given truths, possibilities and entities are received in Asiyah.

In Asiyah we take what is given as given objects of perception and truth and construct from them. To the best of our ability, we construct systems that combine into interoperating units with emergent systemic wholeness.

These systems may or may not correspond with the articulations of Ruach’s articulate everything. If they do, they are experienced as meaningful, natural and might resonate with Ruach’s sense of personal purpose and at-homeness. If they do not, they will feel unnatural and alien.

When “modernity” is used pejoratively, often this refers to refusal to seek transcendental ratification for systems. If a system functions, that is sufficient. This fills the world with unnatural and alien systems, and makes reality itself feel overwhelmingly meaningless and complicated. When people stop expecting meaning and lose sight of meaning as a goal, or even possibility, when we stop expecting to feel at home and no longer believe we have a right to personal purpose, we succumb to nihilism.

Organism is the intersection of articulate everything without exterior and every thing systematized without interior.

Thing without interior is empty shell, klippah.

When we see an image of a tzadik, saint, bodhisattva or angel with a halo, it is natural to assume the light is radiating from them into the world around them. It is important, though, to understand this radiance a second everted way, for in Beriah relationships evert, and in Yetzirah, Asiyah and Beriah interpenetrate.

From Beriah, light radiates into its focus, centripetally. The halo radiates into the soul, before radiating back out into Asiyah.

The angels on Jacob’s Ladder ascend and descend, and this is the respiration of light.

The circular sefirot is sometimes depicted with a flame-like perimeter. It is a macrocosmic halo, and the flames are actually descending into finitude ex nihilo from the infinite Ein Sof, the infinite One.

Angelic being invites infinite light to concentrate ex nihilo in Ruach in order to reflect and refract into the world.

Diabolical being blocks everything from beyond Ruach and has only darkness to reflect or refract. Ruach envies the Infinite One and wants its quasi-infinitude to be absolute. It casts whatever defies it into nonexistence, and whatever will not perform nonexistence for it will be annihilated and made nonexistent.

Eversion reverses relations.

Totalitarianisms seek to displace and replace Neshamah (transsubjective selfhood Beriah) with themselves.

In Asiyah, you objectify reality. In Beriah, reality subjectifies you!

The Russian reversal joke performs this truth. In Soviet Russia, for example, television watches you.

Diabolical means thrown across. Dia– “across” + –bolos “thrown”. Diabolical means both throwing part of infinitude out into nothingness, and being thrown out from infinitude into quasi-infinite finitude without interior: klippah.

Being chosen, though, also means choosing to take one’s given place within infinitude.

Exnihilism is annihilation everted. Exnihilism prays epiphanic irruptions through the veil of nihilitude from inexhaustible infinitude. Birth is everted death; birthpangs and deathpangs are crossings between infinite and finite being.

One profound conversion may seem like a crossing from a false world to a true one.

Two profound conversions may seem like a crossing between two contingently true worlds.

Three profound conversions, something truer and realer than any true world may reveal itself.

I-X

Philosophy

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.” — Nietzsche

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Saint-Exupery

Martin Buber spoke of Thou and It, not as entities, but as relations with I. They are terms of either I-It or I-Thou. The choice is existential, and concerns the subject, I, as much as the object or fellow-subject.

These two relationships, I-It and I-Thou, are incommensurable — essentially different, ontologically different — belonging as they do to different dimensions of being: Asiyah and Yetzirah, respectively.

The question of I-It or I-Thou is the difference between meeting one’s other as mere Nefesh (defined, objective soul) in Asiyah alone, or as Ruach (defining, subjective spirit) in Yetzirah.

One primary value of marriage, and family in general, is being stuck with someone.

When people are too easily escaped, rejected, or made “dead to us” we neglect our most momentous and potentially transformative challenges, which nearly always involve an existential choice between meeting another who disturbs us as a transcendent -Thou to our own troubled I-, or reducing them to another tamely immanent -It, a thing among things within our own solitary everything.

Our human tendency is to stay in the comfortable objective givenness of Asiyah. Convenient breaking of relational bonds, escaping or ostracizing disturbing others, ideologically objectifying others as identities — these are all ways we imprison ourselves in collective or individual solitary confinement.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

An objective mind assumes, from within its objectivity, that not only truth but reality itself is objective, and that an absolute truth, as truth, must be objective.

To make an analogy, looking at an optical illusion and noting the marks that constitute it is further from the absolute than the mysterious act of seeing its various multistable gestalt states. After we have seen multiple gestalt states, reflect on the experience and call the image an “optical illusion”, this is an improvement to our objectivity, but we are back to objectivity. We were closer to the absolute when we were between stabilities.

Conversations with designers

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Yesterday I had two unusual conversations with fellow designers.

In each conversation, I started from fire-snorting righteous rage. But in each conversation my anger failed me. It disintegrated as I spoke, and I felt it slip away. And though I felt relief losing the rage, I also missed it.

In the first conversation, I was doing that managerial design leadership legitimacy critique I’ve been developing. But even as I sermonized I felt compelled to temper what I was saying with acknowledgement of the difficulty of any leader’s position. Every leader has a duty to those who depend on them and to those who entrust them with a leadership role. These duties give them a right to make judgment calls regarding the welfare of their organizations. The ideals of design are and should be one consideration weighed in these judgments, but this is not the only one, and it is far from certain that design ideals ought to predominate over other values.

Design ideals, like all other ideals, can become extreme and excessive, succumb to destructive fanaticism, and an ideal is never more vulnerable than when it fancies itself immune to excess or so essentially good that it is exempt from limit and restraint.

I believe the version of myself who acknowledges this is morally superior to the design fanatic who insists otherwise. This does not mean I agree with the calls that managerialist design leaders make. I strenuously disagree. But my disagreements are better when I disagree with strict agonistic discipline.

I do believe design — design as I practice it, know it and love it — is not only in tension with managerialism but incompatible with managerialism, in practice and understanding. I believe design’s greatest value is in providing a different and more humane vision of social organization. To put it in the familiar Kuhnian framing, it is a rival organizational paradigm that is the stuff of crisis and revolution.

But what kind of revolution? In his essay “A Cautious Prometheus” Bruno Latour suggests that a design revolution should start with revolutionizing revolutions. He noted five characteristics of design:

  1. Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than foundational acts of creation.
  2. Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
  3. Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
  4. Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
  5. Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.

So far, I’ve mentioned two thinkers I love, and alluded to a third, Chantal Mouffe, when I mentioned agonism. What is agonism?

Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).

Modern science as much as any domain, and arguably more than any other, is strictly agonistic. It was born with liberal democracy (for a gorgeously involved account of how and why, I recommend Leviathan and the Air-Pump).

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this time with a recommitment to strictly practice it: If I could impart one idea to humankind it would be agonism. It is the cure for what ails us and threatens our existence as a species.

And agonism is a precondition of design creativity — again, design as I practice it, know it and love it.

Which brings me to my second conversation. Here I was making my usual distinctions between art and engineering — and now managerialism. My friend was asking me extremely simple and relevant questions about all the various uses of the word design, and what was common to them. It began to feel like a Socratic interrogation.

I gave many of my usual criteria.

Design crafts things intended for other people.

“Is cooking a kind of design?” Well, no. Design specifies form, function and material, but does not produce the final materialized, functional form. Cooking is a handicraft.

“What about writing a recipe?” Yes. Recipes are designs, informed by the handicraft of cooking. The cooking is analogous to prototyping.

“What about the design engineers do? For example, microchips are designed.” Yes, but in a different sense that specifies form, function and material for something that will eventually be produced. And admittedly, it is produced for other people. But it is specified without reference to how others will experience the thing…

“So art is design?” Art is intended for the artist, made to the artist’s satisfaction. Great art speaks to whatever is universal (or at least greater) in the artist. It reveals what is most intimately shared between the artist and those who respond to the work.

“But Dieter Rams was answering to his own judgment alone.” I consider him, and many other famous designers, to be more artist than designer.

Etcetera, etcetera.

And as we talked, and as I tap-danced, hair-split, ramified and qualified and improvised, I noticed that my intensity was calming. The intensity was not diminishing, but it was a less jagged, jangly, aggressive kind of intensity.

Maybe the vision of design that has gripped me is just one species of design. I care about it a lot, but maybe a sprinkle of Rortian irony will improve its flavor. And maybe design has become a practical vehicle for something else I care about. And maybe I can serve what I care about better if I stop running around brandishing my philosopher’s stone and smashing things with it. There’s enough brandishing and smashing and bellowing and threatening out there right now. Since quoting heroes seems to be my lot today, I’ll channel Marty Neumeier and suggest that maybe some zagging would be a nice contrast.

For whatever reason, my anger has diminished over the last month. Even when I write aggressive words, they come from a less vitriolic place. Susan is also undergoing some profound changes in a peaceful direction. We are both no longer under the direct control of managerialist administrators, both of whom were uncannily similar in certain respects. I cannot promise this mood will stick, especially once projects are underway. I am never going to deny or repress what I experience. I find that kind of emotional self-manipulation to be both counterproductive and non-credible. But I do prefer this to the mood of the last several years.

Complacentia

Enworldment, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Asiyah is the objective dimension of nature and artifice.

Yetzirah is the transcendental dimension of soul (subject).

Beriah is the metaphysical dimension of spirit (relative infinitude).

Atzilut is the transcendent dimension of infinitude.

Objective reason is an inadequate mode of knowing beyond Asiyah. The attempt to grasp soul/subject and metaphysics objectively is the supreme category mistake, made by materialists, positivists, managerials, psychologists and metaphysical dogmatists, alike.

Objectifying the superobjective is the human species’s analogue to a dog chasing its tail.

Isn’t this framework objective? Yes, it is objective, but not merely objective.

This way of understanding things has become my latest and best naive realism.

I am unable to doubt it. I cannot avoid understanding everything in its light.

Worse, I find myself entirely disinclined to interrogate it.

This is an abject failure of philosophy, but a triumph of faith.

It is an enworldment to inhabit, a palatial sukkah.

…Palatial … palate … taste, sophia…

Saint Friedrich of Sils-Maria said:

Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).

Years ago I noticed that I asked Why only when I could not feel Why.

Rerereading Richard J. Bernstein

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I am once again rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.

I’m reading it with a thesis: that the Greek word phronesis roughly corresponds to Hebrew derash and refers to the same domain of truth.

My obsession with alternate domains of truth and modes of knowing originates with this book. I’ve wandered pretty far abroad, along divergent traditional paths, and now I want to bring it all home and see how things look.

And modes of knowing is only one of several enduring influences this book had on me. Almost every book in my sprawling library is three or fewer degrees from its bibliography, most fewer.

I am pretty sure it was my first encounter with Jewish styles of thought. At one point I thought Bernstein had invented an entirely new genre of literature. He seemed to be expressing his own ideas through the medium of other people’s dialogue. After a decade of Jewish life, I now know to call this talmudic. Many thinkers and friends drew me into Judaism, but none more than Bernstein.

He also gave me my first exposure to phenomenology and pragmatism, both of which provided crucial philosophical grounding (ironically!) for a philosophical understanding of design. I think more than three-quarters of my design philosophy is represented by and directly attributable to this one book.

Richard J. Bernstein died in 2022.

For me, his memory is a constant blessing. I would like to believe his living presence in my life is a share in his immortality.

Design, enworldment and holistic orders

Design, Enworldment, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Thinking out loud here…

I have been gnawing endlessly on a question of holism.

My thesis is that when people say the word “holism” they generally assume only one of two kinds of holism, reducing the other to the one they know.

I have given these holisms various names over the years.

  • Systemic wholes, belonging to a constructive order that constitutes wholes from assembled parts, bottom-up.
  • Gestalt wholes, belonging to a conceptive order that comprises parts articulated from wholes, top-down.

I believe that these two orders naturally diverge, like notes in scales of different keys, becoming less and less in tune with one another as they ramify, either upwards in ever-expanding systems or downwards in ever-finer articulations.

Further, I believe design is the discipline responsible for getting the two holisms to converge in a local, temporary and tentative unity. I call this unity of dual holisms “enworldment” and I conceptualize the effort of convergence as a “hermeneutic sphere”.

Not every system we construct — however perfectly integrated its functioning, and however much it generates emergent qualities (which makes the system a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts) — will be conceived as a meaningful thing within our sense of everything. A system can be meaningless or even induce nihilism, because it is incompatible with our overall sense of everything. This is fine if the system we are constructing is hidden, or handled only by specialists, but all too often these systems are allowed to damage cultural meaning. No matter how well physics accounts for the behaviors of particles in space, or applies this knowledge to build miraculous digital devices, none of it can make us feel the importance of our lives together.

Not every given thing we perceive as real or conceive as true — however self-evident, meaningful and important it may be to us or to our community — is a suitable part of a system. Some things cannot be integrated and interfere with the functioning of a system. A faith can be overwhelmingly meaningful and even the source of everything we care about, yet what it implies to be true cannot hold up under any systematic scrutiny nor is it helpful in any practical application. This is fine in purely symbolic spheres of life, for instance art or religion, but if they are applied beyond their sphere, they produce inadequately integrated systems. No religious scripture can explain electricity or help an engineer build a battery.

To get both, we must not only tack between parts and wholes in each order to get whole and part to reinforce one another, we must tack between the two orders of wholeness until both orders together form a whole reinforced equally by the wholes and parts of each order. Two hermeneutic circles, in a single hermeneutic sphere.

The question bothering me is whether there really is a “hermeneutic sphere” of two holistic orders, each with its own hermeneutic circle — or whether the plain old flat hermeneutic circle already accounts for both orders. What I call “construction” could just be the bottom-up side of the same hermeneutic circle, whose other side is top-down “conception”.

There is a fine line between playing with a structure (as we might play with a new tool) to see what can be done with it, versus going whole-hog Pygmalion with it. If only the line were only fine, and not also faint, snaky and nebulous.

In my defense, the truth of this framing does not have to be absolute. A physicist inclined to seek constructive wholes still faces the possibility of future scientific crises, challenging the entire conception of the problem that orients the work and shapes the instrumentation of physics as it is currently practiced. And even the most radical neoplatonist must admit that modern chemical engineers can do things with matter beyond the imagination of the most accomplished alchemist, even if those alchemists had superior metaphysical insight.

For all practical purposes, holism is dual, regardless of the ultimate unity, which could very well be beyond all human comprehension of any kind.

Design only cares about practical purposes, which most certainly includes questions of meaning and purpose.

Getting obstreperous over names

Autobiography, Philosophy

Quick note before I forget.

I have toyed with abandoning the word “philosophy” to name my idea craft activities. But an old memory has returned to me and restored my belligerence.

I do philosophy. It’s others who claim the term that I’m not so sure about.

The memory: Back in the 90s, Susan did midwifery activism. One battle she helped fight was resisting the effort of licensed nurse midwives — who practiced modern obstetric nursing in hospitals and birthing centers — to prohibit lay midwives from using the term “midwife”. This infuriated me. Midwives had always, until very recently, all been lay midwives. Why should the lay midwives have the name of their profession stolen from them by technical upstarts? I suggested that if nurse midwives wanted to differentiate themselves from midwives, it was they who should find a new name, and I generously offered the title “obsteress”.

Quasi-infinitudes

Enworldment, Philosophy

Let’s set Rorty spinning in his grave by appropriating, perverting and misapplying his concept of liberal irony to metaphysics.

A good metaphysical citizen exercises metaphysical irony by committing to one of myriad possible quasi-infinite everythings — one enworldment — which participates in the incomprehensible, all-comprehending Infinite One.

Design leadership legitimacy crisis

Design, Politics

TL;DR — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.

Design is, at best, a poorly understood discipline, but more often a systemically misunderstood one.

Design has its own “designerly” ways of thinking, doing and valuing, which represent a completely different and incommensurable social paradigm from that of managerialism. Design knows this; managerialism cannot.

Managerialism, by its very nature, is unable to conceive anything beyond itself. It naively believes its own given truth is absolute. Viewed philosophically, it is locked inside a quite stunted ontology that it believes is reality itself, an epistemology it understands as its sole access to true truth, an ethic it mistakes for morality, and so on. But managerialism famously does not give two shits about philosophy, because it is about action, not speculative dreaming. It cares about what it cares about, and what it cares about is resources it can leverage and utilize to achieve its own quantifiable outcomes.

Design, on the other hand, cares about a plurality of ways of approaching, understanding and shaping the world — what could be called enworldments. This should include managerial worldviews, but it should not include managerialism, the -ism suffix signifying ideological closure that accepts nothing above or even beside itself.

As design is very much and emphatically not managerialist, managerialism does what it does, and reduces design to what managerialism takes it to be. It subjects design to a smug, objectifying, degrading condescension analogous to — and perhaps more than analogous to — that smug, objectifying, degrading and unwarranted condescension to which testosterone-drunk adolescent boys at their worst subject their female counterparts. And similarly — and perhaps identically — when protests are made by these misunderstood, objectified, degraded counterparts, and, inevitably, these protests make little sense to the objectifying, degrading, degraded objectivist minds of businessboys, the protests are jocularly dismissed as nonsense rather than as failures to understand.

Note another -ist. Degraded objectivist minds are an active ingredient of managerialism. To a managerialist, “objective” is a synonym for “absolute.” Reality itself is objective. Subjectivity is only a distorting or blurring or occluding interference to objective access to reality. Managerialism is incapable of apperceiving its own subjective imposition of this objectivism, which is its essential limit. This is a limitation design does not share, but managerialism is oblivious to this truth because managerialism is oblivious to anything it cannot objectively comprehend in its own objective mode of cognition.

Anyone familiar with metacognitive incompetence (popularly known as Dunning-Kruger) will recognize my accusation: I am diagnosing managerialism with ontological metacognitive incompetence. And essential to its metacognitive incompetence is a stubborn refusal to think beyond the strict limitations that are the very source of its malady. It won’t think about how it thinks because this is idle philosophizing and a waste of time. If it did, however, condescend to philosophize, that moment of meta-thinking would destroy its delusions of privileged access to objective reality, starting with the painful insight that objective reality is a naive and manifestly foolish subjective hallucination. Subjectivity objectifies, and reality itself is something that largely escapes objectivity’s comprehending grasp. Designers understand and respond to this reality in ways managerialists cannot.

To say it again, design is a radically pluralist, poly-centered and polycentric social paradigm incommensurable with the managerialist paradigm. Design can and should understand and collaborate with managers, engineers and any other pluralist enworldment. That is what we do. But pluralism is also an -ism — albeit a higher order -ism, a meta-ism — and it must insist on pluralism from its fellows, lest it tolerate aggressive intolerance, and allow its metaphorical “bill of rights” to become a metaphorical “suicide pact”.

Managerialism has all the power in the practical world. It controls business, for sure. But it also controls the state. And worse, it controls most alternative visions of governance. Leftists point at managerialist abuses and call it “capitalism”, while remaining pristinely unaware that their own dreams of seizing technocratic control of society are managerialist through and through. If they manage to get their way their system will generate the same life-sucking nihilism. And indeed, every radical leftist success has repeatedly demonstrably generated horrors and nihilistic despair. Leftist revolutionaries only seek to annihilate one form of managerialism with another, because, being managerialist, managerialism is all they can know. The leftist radical’s self-assessment of radicalism is too shallow to register the sameness of their vision and that of their enemy. They lack anything deeper with which to make a comparison of relative depth. For them, too, reality is objective, which is why they can construe the material mechanisms of history, devise a way to deconstruct the current social order and logically reconstruct a system to replace it. But enough about that — back to business. Back to design.

What concerns me at this moment is a question of legitimacy. How did our design leaders gain their “design leadership” status?

How exactly did they rise to prominence within their organizations and win that coveted seat at the executive table? How do they keep that status? Or better: Who gave them the power and at whose pleasure do they keep it?

Were they raised to leadership by fellow designers who felt that they epitomized designerly virtues, pursued designerly goals and helped their fellow designers excel at their craft? …Who, if dissatisfied, will choose another representative?

Or were they fingered for the position by managerialists who thought what they were saying about design made clear, objective sense, who saw how design might be leveraged to achieve their managerialist aims — and who consequently bought what these design leaders were selling? …Who, if dissatisfied, have absolute firing and hiring authority?

Even a cursory glance makes it crystal clear who answers to whom.

Design leaders often claim their primary role in their organization is to translate design and design’s value into business language, as if these were just two vocabularies for expressing the same ideas and for achieving shared goals.

But they are not. They are incommensurable, clashing paradigms.

Consequently, something must be lost in translation.

What is lost is design itself.

Designers, it is time we interrogate those who claim to represent us.

We must ask them what exactly they think that they are representing when they represent design.

Because it is far from clear that they represent what we do.

Do they represent design to nondesigners on behalf of designers?

Or do they misrepresent design to designers, on behalf of the managerialist order who butters their bread?

Again — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.

I’m not telling designers to take up pitchforks or torches or start assembling Molotov cocktails or anything — but if designers were to stage a mostly peaceful revolt against managerialism, they’d be wise to hold elections among their own kind to decide who leads them to the ramparts, lest the movement be superverted and snuffed by yet more of the same mutiny from above.

This will be compressed and intensified in later iterations.

It is threatening to become a manifesto.